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Category talk:Fictional Descendants of Historical Figures
TR, I've got a real problem with a subcat full of fictional characters being in the Historical Figures category. Turtle Fan 04:25, September 27, 2009 (UTC) :A "real problem"? Is that a joke? TR 23:26, September 27, 2009 (UTC) ::I suppose it could be, though I can't see how. But I do think it should be removed from Historical Figures (which, if you hadn't noticed, is now our sole category for such figures at long last. Not counting Living People, of course, which by the way I discovered is the proper home of the 81-year old Tom Lehrer.) Turtle Fan 23:28, September 27, 2009 (UTC) :::Your wording was extreme, considering the rather minor issue. ::::I neither considered it, nor meant it, to be so. Apologies. Turtle Fan 23:41, September 27, 2009 (UTC) :::::Accepted. TR 23:44, September 27, 2009 (UTC) :::I want the Fictional Descendants to be noticable. As a freefloating category, I fear it will just sort of vanish, so subcatting it with one of the larger categories strikes me as sensible, especially the category it's most directly connected to. We can move it, that's fine. ::::How about Prominent Families? Turtle Fan 23:41, September 27, 2009 (UTC) :::::That works. TR 23:44, September 27, 2009 (UTC) :::Tom Lehrer is still alive? TR 23:38, September 27, 2009 (UTC) ::::It appears so. You know, I had never heard of him when I saw his name in AWoD (a very awkward reference, by the way) and had to look him up to write the article. And I still have not heard of him otherwise. Turtle Fan 23:41, September 27, 2009 (UTC) :::::Yeah, I wasn't terribly familiar before you put up the article. Something in his bio rang a bell. Can't remember what. :::::81? Good for him. TR 23:44, September 27, 2009 (UTC) ::::::I like that he's a musician and mathematician. I know that music draws a lot from math, but I'd think a performer would be too right-brain to want to be a professional mathematician. (And what a professional mathematician is these days is beyond me anyway. I can only think of statisticians, actuaries, and teachers.) Turtle Fan 00:01, September 28, 2009 (UTC) Fictional Spouses It occurs to me that we have enough fictional spouses of historical figures to fill their own category. TR 19:15, April 5, 2011 (UTC) :Do we? I don't doubt you're right but I'm not able to think of anyone offhand, except for Kate. Who'd you have in mind? Turtle Fan 00:13, April 6, 2011 (UTC) ::Alexandra Clemens and Anne Wingfield. If we had an article for Mordechai Anielewicz's wife, that would be four. Actually, that's not much of a category at all, is it? TR 03:41, April 6, 2011 (UTC) :::It meets the threshold. What about growth potential? I mean, I guess any book that includes historical figures could have one, but they really only come up in AH stories that are set a couple of decades after the PoD, and HT doesn't really do much of that anymore. :::Two more who don't exist: Daniel MacArthur's mother (We have the Word of God that she is, but that doesn't mean we can justify creating an article on her) and maybe Woodrow Wilson's wife in TL-191. We do have a mention of her, after a fashion, but do not have certainty that she is fictional. That Wilson was widowed long before the real one, but there are enough historical figures who died young in that series to make it problematic. Turtle Fan 04:34, April 6, 2011 (UTC) By the way, reviewing the exchange above this one, I've decided I was pretty cross with you. Noticing the dates, I'm afraid I was in the middle of the most traumatizing ordeal of my life, which dragged on for days. Sorry once again for snapping. Turtle Fan 04:34, April 6, 2011 (UTC) :Sure. Ordeals are no fun. TR 04:43, April 6, 2011 (UTC) Questionable entries I'm wondering if Stanley Owana Laanui, Charles W. La Follette, and Martin Roosevelt really belong in this category. Stanley's lineage is incredibly vague, and we just assume that La Follette and Roosevelt are members of the prominent families of those names. We don't have any actual statement that either of these characters is a son or grandson of some historical figure.JonathanMarkoff (talk) 08:37, May 7, 2016 (UTC) :Stanley is vague, but since he is explicitly tied to a real family, he belongs here. :Roosevelt and La Follette fall neatly into HT's standard tropes. They belong here. TR (talk) 15:20, May 7, 2016 (UTC) :I bring up the issue because Worldwar's Pyotr Maksimovich is apparently a fictional cousin of Mikhail Gorbachev, but it's ambiguous as to what the precise relation is. :The problem with Stanley is that there wasn't much of an OTL Hawaiian royal family to be descended from. David Kalakaua founded Hawaii's final royal dynasty from scratch, and being childless he was succeeded by his sister Queen Liliʻuokalani. Queen Lil and her niece Princess Kaʻiulani died childless, so the succession in pretense passed to their cousin David Kawānanakoa, whose wife was Abigail Kawananakoa. (Which might make it a little implausible that Abigail could be considered an heir by the Japs, as she was the dowager of a pretender, not an actual heiress.) Stanley is supposedly a much more distant relation of the Kalakauas, and therefore not a Fictional Descendant of a Historical Figure, but more like a Fictional Cousin of a Historical Figure. Just like Pyotr M.JonathanMarkoff (talk) 03:03, May 8, 2016 (UTC) ::Yes, he appears to be an indirect descendant. But somewhere in his fictional woodpile, he shares a link with a real person. TR (talk) 05:42, May 8, 2016 (UTC) ::Ah, I see. Our definition was perhaps a little too strictly focused on direct descendants, while we've been fairly broad in including all fictional descendants. TR (talk) 05:48, May 8, 2016 (UTC) :::Maybe it should be retitled Fictional Relatives of Historical Figures, to allow a little more leeway.JonathanMarkoff (talk) 05:54, May 8, 2016 (UTC) :::I may have been too hasty in removing the category from Pyotr based on his Lit. Comm. The one for Gorbachev does make for a stronger case. ML4E (talk) 17:58, May 8, 2016 (UTC) Unnamed Rulers I see Jonathan has added this cat to the redirects that TR created earlier. While technically true, I don't think this serves any useful purpose. Yes, they would be fictional descendants but that would be true of all fictional characters since they would not have come into existence by spontaneous generation. I think this cat should be reserved for explicit lineages for named characters. ML4E (talk) 22:30, January 12, 2018 (UTC) :Hereditary monarchies rely on descendants. In Curious Notions (novel), the Central Powers monarchs are most probably descendants or younger cousins of the victors of 1914. The King of England is one I deliberately did not include, because England's history in A3477 is shakier.JonathanMarkoff (talk) 22:54, January 12, 2018 (UTC) ::Fictional characters logically are also descendants of historical people. The King of England would be one too, even if not a Windsor. It is not relevant for such minor characters and so should not be cated as such. ML4E (talk) 23:04, January 12, 2018 (UTC) Jonathan tried this stunt again. Stop it unless you can convince us otherwise. ML4E (talk) 19:20, May 27, 2018 (UTC)